The present invention relates to a silicon-photonics device. More particularly, the present invention provides a compact Transverse Electric (TE) polarizer based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform, a method of making the TE polarizer, and a silicon-photonics circuit integrated with the TE polarizer for wide band communication in DWDM system.
Over the last few decades, the use of broadband communication networks exploded. In the early days Internet, popular applications were limited to emails, bulletin board, and mostly informational and text-based web page surfing, and the amount of data transferred was usually relatively small. Today, Internet and mobile applications demand a huge amount of bandwidth for transferring photo, video, music, and other multimedia files. For example, a social network like Facebook processes more than 500 TB of data daily. With such high demands on data and data transfer, existing data communication systems need to be improved to address these needs.
Large-scale photonic integrated circuits are becoming very promising for many applications, including next-generation optical networks, optical interconnects, dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) systems, coherent transceivers, lab-on-chip, etc. Silicon-based photonics integrated circuits have also become very popular, because of their compatibility with mature CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) technologies with excellent processing control, low cost and high volume processing. Furthermore, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) is widely used as substrates for making various silicon-photonics devices. It is well known that SOI waveguides are usually severely polarization-sensitive so that many polarization handling devices including integrated optical polarizer have become very important components in polarization sensitive Si Photonics Circuit.
For example, a compact polarizer made by a simple and high tolerance in process on SOI substrate and easy being integrated with other silicon-photonics devices becomes a crucial component for Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) in C-band or O-band. Prior approaches of making the polarizer for silicon-photonics are mostly process intolerant, complicated, dimension sensitive, or hard to be integrated with other silicon-photonics devices.
Therefore, it is desired to develop improved compact, simple, process-robust TE polarizer for easy integrating in silicon-photonics circuit for wide band DWDM application.